41 
V 1 



THE 



CARPENTER 

AND SOME EDUCATED GENTLEMEN 



BY DR. ALEXANDER IRVINE 




DR. ALEXANDER IRVINE 



LONDON : EVANS BROTHERS LIMITED 



Price I/- Net 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/carpentersomeeduOOirvi 



THE CARPENTER 

AND SOME EDUCATED GENTLEMEN 



BY 



.U;v S 



*>^ 



ALEXANDER, IRVINE 

AUTHOR OF "MY LADY OF THE CHIMNEY 
CORNER," "SOULS OF POOR FOLK." ETC. 




EVANS BROTHERS LIMITED 

MONTAGUE HOUSE, RUSSELL SQUARE, LONDON, W.C. 1 



.11 



A3 




10, Downing Street, 

Whitehall, S.W.1, 

May 17th, 1921. 



Dear Dr. Irvine, — 

Great Britain is under a deep obligation to you for your 
generous and patriotic services rendered during the last 
eighteen months of the war in holding meetings and giving 
addresses, at the request of the Government, to the troops at 
the front, in France and Belgium, for the special purpose of 
imparting fresh courage and cheer to our fighting warriors. 

You displayed unique gifts in pursuing this great work, 
which, with your own experience as a soldier, caused you to 
be received with warm appreciation by officers and men 
everywhere. 

You subsequently visited the chief industrial centres of 
Great Britain, where your life-long connection and experience 
with Labour movements, supported by your native eloquence 
and earnestness, secured a welcome hearing for you every- 
where. 

It is right and fitting to say that these valuable services 
were rendered by you without any personal emolument, and 
you have my cordial good wishes for continued and increasing 
success in your public-spirited career. 
Yours sincerely, 




Dr. Alexander Irvine. 



ROBERT HAZEN IRVINE 



THE OCCASION 

jA DDRESSES to graduating classes are 
/^k usually rather dull pabulum. The usual 
/ y& speaker talks to students who have com- 
/ J^ pleted a college course as if they had just 
dropped from the planet Mars, in a band- 
box, and were about for the first time to be instructed 
in the habits and customs of the people who inhabit 
the earth. 

The speakers are usually hand-picked mortals who 
have acquired a reputation for having something to 
say, and knowing how to say it. Most of the men 
I have heard at these dull, heavy ceremonies were 
apostles of the obvious who were typical products of 
the " passionless pursuit of passionless knowledge." 
Men who thought or worked athwart the usual lines 
of progress were not invited. The prophet is not 
without honour, save in a college pulpit ! 

This story is about a different kind of a ceremony, 
and a vastly different kind of address. 

About one hundred and fifty students arranged a 
farewell dinner. They were about to go out into 
various parts of the world. As a body of men who 
had been intimately associated with each other for 
four years, they desired to celebrate the occasion in 
such a way that in the years to come they would look 
back upon it with pleasure. 

The affair was held in a banqueting hall, known 
the world over for its elegance and beauty. The 



men were arrayed in full evening dress. Ensconced 
in a balcony an orchestra rendered a programme of 
classical music. The menus were exquisitely printed 
in gold and colours — the colours of the university. 

One item on the programme was different — 
different from any other programme ever arranged 
by a graduating class. The speaker was a joke. He 
was selected as such. He was a Professor whose 
opinion of college addresses was well known. He 
had a poor opinion of pious piffle. He had courage 
to say so, and his aversion — his pet aversion — was 
well known. 

The original idea of the committee was to omit the 
address altogether. The Professor's selection was a 
compromise. It was believed that he would turn the 
invitation down. If any one had thought for a 
moment that there was the slightest chance of his 
acceptance, he would never have been invited. To 
the amazement of the committee, he accepted. They 
looked at each and laughed. It was a great joke ! 



ATHWART THE LINES 

DESPITE his reputation for entertaining 
" odd " notions, he was one of the most 
popular teachers in the university. He 
had a keen sense of humour. He enjoyed 
a joke on the students or on his subject — 
which was Literature — but enjoyed it equally well 
when the fun was at his own expense. In his wit and 
humour there was no sting. He laughed with people 
— never at them. He was the only Professor I ever 
knew who participated in and enjoyed spinning tops 
and shooting marbles with the Seniors when in the 
spring-time they engaged in the traditional sport. 
He did it because he liked it, and could see no reason 
why age — he was forty-five then — should rob him of 
this joy. 

From an orthodox educationist's point of view, I 
suppose he was a heretic. His methods were unique. 
I shall never forget a talk he gave us once on the 
Literature of the age of Victoria. Turning around 
in his chair, and pointing to the bare wall behind him, 
he said : "I want you to imagine that on the wall 
there, there is the big white face of a clock. Every 
minute represents a year. The hands are at twelve. 
Now watch the big hand go slowly around." We 
watched. I see that clock now, I hear the names of 
books and authors during the age of Victoria. 
Around and around he went in the most fascinating 
lecture I ever heard. 



Once a month we voted on what book he would 
expound. This was an extra. Something we all 
wanted. One month we voted for " David Copper- 
field." His introductory talk on it was startling. 
" Don't think of this book as a book," he said ; 
" think of it as a play ! I am going to ring up the 
curtain and let the players walk across the stage, just 
so that we may say * How do you do ? ' to them." 

Part of that speech no man who heard it will ever 
forget. " The next character, if I am any judge of 
human nature," he said, " is more closely allied 
intellectually to the majority of this class than any 
man I know in fiction — Gentlemen, Mr. Wilkins 
Micawber ! " 

He assigned to each of us a character in the book, 
and when we arose to read, we impersonated the 
character. With the keen instinct of the true teacher, 
he knew what would happen to the man who had to 
imitate Uriah Heep, so he made us take our turn in 
the character of the hypocrite. 

Thus he made Literature a living thing, and we 
loved it because it was part of life. 

One of his odd notions was that modern education 
did not educate at all. Education to him was equip- 
ment for life. Its object should be to so train a man's 
mind that he could go through life with the largest 
possible amount of co-operation with his fellows, and 
with the least possible degree of friction. When he 
asked how many of us were going to become carpen- 
ters or blacksmiths, we laughed. 

" Why do you laugh ? " he would ask. We didn't 
know. 



" You see, gentlemen," he would say calmly and 
seriously, " what we do create here is the academic 
mind. The academic mind deals with abstractions, 
and when you leave here you go out into a real world 
— a world of realities — you discover that your abstrac- 
tions fit into the realities as square pegs fit into round 
holes." 

He would lay his hand flat on the table in front of 
him and, looking at us, ask : " Why can't this table 
be measured with a quart measure ? " 

We could grasp that. We answered, and he drove 
home the point : " Neither can life be measured by 
a book ! Life must be measured by life ! " 

Only those who have occasionally lost their way on 
the barren moorlands of theological speculation can 
ever fully appreciate the full meaning of such a phrase. 
It became, to me at least, like a mariner's compass to 
a ship at sea. 



INSTEAD OF A SPEECH 

" f — >y ENTLEMEN," the Professor began, 

m when he had been introduced, " I have 

H m never made a speech in my life. Don't 

^L ^m be alarmed, I am not going to make one 

now. I am going to say something, 

and while in the act, I will follow the directions laid 

down by Luther : ' Stand up straightly, speak out 

boldly, sit down quickly ! ' 

" We are in one of the world's greatest banqueting 
halls. Belshazzar's hall, compared to this, was a 
lodging on a third floor back. No such art existed 
in those days as we see around us here. No such 
viands graced his board. We live in a new age, an 
age of art, artcraftmanship and luxury. From the 
remotest corners of the earth came the things on this 
table. From the lowest forms of day labour to the 
highest aspects of fine art we have around us at least 
a hundred forms of human work. 

" For instance, take this beautiful tablecloth. 
What exquisite workmanship ! It involves weaving 
— to go no further back — bleaching, smoothing and 
designing. It is damask linen, pleasing and beautiful 
to the eye. I want to ask you a question. Is there 
any one here who, from personal experience, knows 
anything about the labour involved ? Have you ever 
touched the making of linen at any stage ? I am 
quite serious, gentlemen. If any of you have, I would 



ask you to say so." There was absolute silence. 
" I am right, then, in assuming that it is utterly 
beyond your ken. 

" Let me draw attention to the exquisite examples 
of pottery here. Surely we are all agreed that the 
men and women who produce such things are artists. 
What a joy it must be for a man to hold such a piece 
of work in his hand and say, ' I made it ! ' Many 
forms of labour are involved here also — the digging 
of clay, the carting, fashioning, burning, baking, 
painting and finishing. If there is a man present 
who has ever contributed in any way to such work, I 
would like to know about it. No one ! 

" Perhaps some of you know about cut glass. 
Great labour, great art are also necessary here. It is 
very rare, very costly. These beautiful things did 
not drop out of the clouds. Their origin is mysterious 
to us, but not to the folk who spend their lives in such 
work. What sort of lives do they live ? Are they 
as human as we are ? Do we ever meet them in 
social life ? I will not detail the processes. I would 
be surprised if any one here had ever been associated 
with such labour. I assume no one has." 

In like manner he spoke of the silver, and dwelt 
somewhat at length on mining and the life of the 
miner. Nothing escaped his notice. He called 
attention to the carpet and rugs on the floor, to the 
curtains and drapery of the great windows ; to the 
mural decorations executed by the greatest of living 
decorators. There was a rich fresco around the hall. 
He drew attention to it. At every turn he asked the 
same pointed question, and to every question there 



was the same negative reply, indicated by silence — 
only silence. 

It began to look as if the whole thing was a frost 
and a kill-joy proceeding. Suddenly he returned to 
the great table, heavily laden with beautiful things. 
" Most of you spent some years in the study of 
Botany. Well, we have on the table quite a display 
of cut flowers — don't be afraid, I am not going to 
test your knowledge, but I would be surprised if any 
of you, even after years of study, could completely 
classify what we see and enjoy on this table ! " 

There was a disposition to laugh, but even the 
rehearsal for a smile was wiped from every face 
around the table when in serious quiet tones he said, 
" Perhaps you are to be congratulated that you are 
at an age when a sense of humour covers a multitude 
of sins, but personally I can't enjoy that which gives 
me pain. I am a representative university man 
seriously asking myself and you whether the thing 
we call education is really education at all ? " 

The silence became a little oppressive. The men 
were thinking. Each man was thinking for himself, 
and all of them were wondering how they could 
balance the little they knew with the number of 
things they knew nothing about. 

" Perhaps," he continued, " I should have put you 
more at your ease by informing you that I know as 
little about these things as you do. I never knew the 
joy of making and fashioning things with my own 
hands. Here we are, then, a group of men on whom 
a university has set its stamp. We produce nothing 
we eat ; we are ignorant of the origin of the things we 



see. We are as helpless as children in a big world of 
real things, and truth compels us to confess that in 
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the chief motive 
of a college education is to escape actual participation 
in just such work as gives, or ought to give, joy to the 
worker. 

" A timekeeper performs a useful function, so 
does a cash-register, but the function of education is 
not to turn out cash-registers or timekeepers ! The 
president of a great university has ventured the 
opinion that if ten bachelors of art were shipwrecked 
in mid-ocean they could not build a pontoon to 
save their lives. They would be equally helpless 
in a critical emergency where practical knowledge 
of the ordinary things around us was imperatively 
necessary. 

" We do not solve the problem by stating it or 
defining it. No progress can be made by merely 
locating or apportioning blame. The creative mind, 
the constructive imagination must get us out of the 
slough. Meantime, healthy-minded men must pro- 
test. With that end in view I accepted your invita- 
tion. This is not a speech. I have never made one 
in my life. It is a protest and a suggestion. 



DOES THE UNIVERSITY EDUCATE? 

EDUCATION must prepare and equip 
men and women for the duties, privi- 
leges, and responsibilities of life. A 
smattering of languages, of mathematics, 
of history, of science, constitute but a 
very small portion of such equipment. 

" The main purpose of a college course is not to 
turn out bosses, gaffers, timekeepers, and human 
cash- registers. 

" Most of you are destined to be masters of men. 
You will be the organisers, overseers, and directors 
of men who produce things. When you see men 
doing the necessary work of the world — making, 
shaping, fashioning, producing useful and beautiful 
things, I would like you to remember that they are 
performing a far higher social service than the men 
who merely keep their accounts or speculate on their 
labour. They are making an infinitely nobler con- 
tribution to the happiness of mankind than those 
men who merely clip coupons or live by the sweat of 
other brows than their own. 

" Why should a university perpetuate a revolt 
against Nature in which the man who does no useful 
work at all is considered a gentleman and the man 
who by his labour feeds the world, clothes the world, 
and adds to its comfort, health, wealth, and beauty, 
be considered low caste ? Why should it be con- 
sidered an unthinkable thing that a man should 
spend some years at a university in order to fit him- 
self for the career of a carpenter — a blacksmith, or a 



bricklayer ? By whose standard of judgment does 
a college man deem it unworthy, if not degrading, 
to handle tools ? 

" Here you are, a large group of men just gradu- 
ated from a famous university. You are Bachelors 
of Art — whatever that may mean — you are surrounded 
with all the luxury 7 , art, and convenience of the 
highest form of civilisation, and you are as ignorant 
of the processes by which these things were pro- 
duced as you were w T hen you were in your cradles. 
I am as ignorant as you are. We produce nothing 
we eat ; we could not even lend a hand in the 
making of anything we see around us, and yet we 
are stamped as educated men. The university 
approves of us. Who will approve of the university ? 

" I am not blaming you. That would be unfair. 
We have a system. Yesterday you were its victims ; 
to-day you have become its custodians. For four 
years it was imposed upon you; henceforth you 
impose it upon others. The real things, the things 
that are fundamental to life and character, are not in 
the curriculum. The system encourages a vague 
hope that somehow, in some mysterious way you will 
acquire these things by your own initiative, your own 
sense of need. Some men feel that need acutely. 
Some feel it not at all and become prigs and sciolists. 

" The assumption that your certificates of gradua- 
tion entitle you to be numbered in a superior class 
rests on a flimsy foundation. You go out into a real 
world of real things, a world where success will not 
be measured, as it is here, by a good memory, nor 
failure by a bad one. 



THE CARPENTER 

THE one cardinal thought I had in mind 
when I accepted this invitation, was 
to remind you that the highest form of 
culture and refinement known to man- 
kind was intimately associated with 
tools and manual labour. In order to do that the 
more effectively, I want to draw on your imaginations. 
I want to present to you a picture which accords with 
the facts of history and experience." 

He pushed his chair back and stood a few feet 
from the table. His face betrayed deep emotion. 
His voice became wonderfully soft and irresistibly 
appealing. The college men had been intensely in- 
terested, they were now spellbound. He raised his 
hand and went through the motions of drawing aside 

a curtain. 

* * * 

" Gentlemen," he said, " may I introduce to you 
a young Galilean Carpenter — Jesus of Nazareth ! " 
It was a weird act. The silence became oppressive. 
As if addressing an actual person of flesh and blood, 
he continued : " Master, may I ask you, as I have 
asked these young men, whether there is anything in 
this room that you could make with your hands ? " 

There was a brief pause, only a moment or two, 
then with the measured stride of an Oriental he 
walked to the end of the table, and taking hold of the 
corner of the damask linen tablecloth, he laid bare 
the corner and a leg of the carved oaken table. In 
that position, with the cloth in his hand, he looked 
into the faces of the men and said : " The Master 
says ' Yes, I could make the table — I am a 
Carpenter.' " 



LIBRARY OF CONGRES: 




019 847 553 1 



MANY THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE ARE 
FAMILIAR WITH DR. IRVINE'S EVER- 
CHARMING "MY LADY OF THE 
CHIMNEY CORNER," AND HIS NEW 
BOOK, "THE SOULS OF POOR 
FOLK," CONTINUES THE THEME 
WHICH HE BEGAN IN HIS FORMER 
BOOK. HE GIVES SOFTLY 
COLOURED PICTURES OF HIS 
EARLY LIFE IN ANTRIM, AND THE 
CENTRAL, MOST LOVABLE FIGURE 
IS STILL. AS IN " MY LADY OF THE 
CHIMNEY CORNER," HIS MOTHER. 
THESE PICTURES, TOLD AS DR 
IRVINE TELLS THEM. ARE FULL OF 
PATHOS AND HUMOUR DELI- 
CATELY TOUCHED IN BY A MASTER 
HAND 



